Friday, April 14, 2006

Either despite Bush’s best efforts or because of them, the U.S. invasion of Iraq strengthened Iran and set the stage for an Iran/Shi’ite alliance. Pledging to smash the “Axis of Evil”, Bush has had the opposite effect –creating a radical theocracy in Iraq and an emerging nuclear power in Iran. Now – Ahmadinejad’s speeches to Iranians sound like Bush to Americans.

As the “Existentialist Cowboy” predicted on December 25, 2005, the violence in Iraq increased as it delineated the battle lines between Sunni and Shia. A break up of Iraq is still not out of the question as the Iran/Shia alliance portends a new axis of power in the Middle East. None of these developments had been on the horizon before Bush implemented a failed strategy: pre-emptive, aggressive war.

Would Ahmadinejad have risen to power in Iran had not Bush placed Iran among three nations comprising Bush’s “Axis of Evil”. Probably not!

Would Iran have stepped up its nuclear program if Bush had not bombed and invaded Iraq? Probably not!

Would Ahmadinejad be using Bush-like tactics inside Iran, if Bush had not had such great initial success with it in the United States? Probably not!

Would Ahmadinejad be boasting about joining the nuclear club if civil war underway in Iraq had not strengthened his alliances with the Shi’ite majority in Iraq? Maybe. Maybe not! But it sure makes it more significant.

Who has gained by Bush’s utter incompetence in carrying out an utterly failed, so-called “war on terrorism”? Clearly not the United States which now must somehow deal with the blowback of the most incomptent foreign policy in this nation's history.

Ahmadinejad, meanwhile, becomes the Iranian mirror held up to Bush.

And through it all, a terrible price has been paid for arrogance and incompetence. American losses are now in excess of 2300. Iraqi civilian losses may be greater than 140,000 according to various studies. And there are continuing concerns about inhume treatment of civilians at the hands of the American occupiers. When Bush is removed from office, you can bet that there will be a rising chorus demanding full and truly independent investigations into credible allegations of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and, of course, the war itself –a crime against the peace. And, as long as Bush remains in power, there is no end in sight.'Toons by Dante Lee; use only with permission

The voices for impeachment grow louder and more numerous by the day. More Republicans are running from Bush than Democrats; it looks like a stampede. But impeachment now will only help the GOP hang on to power. Mere impeachment fails to address the numerous crises that our nation now faces.

Impeachment is not even a good stop gap measure and would most certainly fail to stop what appears to be an imminent nuclear strike against Iran. Impeachment now would only make it easier for the Republican party to retain control of both houses of Congress. Impeachment now would make Dick Cheney President. A Cheney impeachment would make Dennis Hastert President. A Hastert impeachment leaves us with the pro tempore of the Senate. After that –Condoleeza Rice! None of these are attractive alternatives. None of them address the crisis we face.

Bush is very credibly quoted as having said: “The Constitution is just a goddamned piece of paper!” It explains why he has clearly violated his oath of office –an oath he took but did not intend to honor.

So –what’s really needed is not the mere impeachment of crooked officials. What’s needed is a profound sea change throughout American culture. What’s needed is a velvet revolution via a new national convention, a new government re-committed to the principles of our Democratic Republic. What we need to do is to literally write George W. Bush and his entire administration out of a job! In fact, nothing positive can be done to reform until the nation faces an unpleasant fact: our government is rotten to the very core –evil, inefficient, crooked, and increasingly fascist, increasingly contemptuous of the very values we grew up with and revere.

Much has been made of Bush’s ex post facto declassification of information resulting in the “outing” of Valerie Plame. And much has been made of the effects: a subversion of American national security, treason! But as far as I know no one has written about an even worse crime. Bush has required of American soldiers that they carry out war crimes in the name of the United States. It is known that murders took place at Abu Ghraib. If what has been said of Abu Ghraib by the Bush administration itself is true, then those murders were “policy”. The policy itself is criminal but the defense –‘we were only following orders' –does not exculpate.

It is the nature of evil that its commission is never confined to one person, but spreads like a cancer. The war against Iraq, the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, the domination of our government “of the people” by the Military/Industrial complex, the ill-advised and often illegal domination of congress by American corporations –all of these things are evidence of a widespread rot literally shot-through American society. And while I especially blame the GOP for rewarding a tiny, radical elite while courting theocrats who most certainly despise our Constitution, Democrats must be faulted for having failed to oppose effectively. Democrats must be faulted for having failed to understand the nature of this threat to Democracy. Democrats must be faulted for having failed to articulate an alternative vision. Someone abandoned his/her post. Someone was asleep at the switch.

The issue is a lot bigger than Democrat vs. Republican, progressive vs. conservative. Only an entirely new paradigm can save America. The America of just one or two generations ago was a different America than the Fox/Walmart America of today. When did we become a fascist nation, espousing fascist values —and why didn’t we see it coming? Howard Zinn asked recently: “What does it take to bring a turnaround in social consciousness - from being a racist to being in favor of racial equality, from being in favor of Bush's tax program to being against it, from being in favor of the war in Iraq to being against it?” That’s the question and impeachment alone won’t answer it.

There are some in this country who believe that war is good for business, but, more properly, good for "war profiteers”. But at a time when the U.S. trade deficit is increasingly an issue, war itself threatens to become America’s chief export. War during Hitler's Third Reich was, similarly, good for business –for a while. Hitler's economy, indeed, boomed –for awhile.

We would like to think that it all turned “bad for business” when the Reich collapsed. But I'm not so sure. In fact, most of the perpetrators of Hitler’s Holocaust got away with it. Despite Simon Weisenthal's best efforts to bring Nazi war criminals to justice, many of the corporate "war profiteers" were never brought to trial. The Bush family continued trading with Hitler even after America joined the war effort. That's just one example.

The corporate, economic power behind the Third Reich was largely untouched; I.G. Farben, for example, was merely broken up. A conglomerate, many of its "subsidiaries" still do business and are doing fine. One of them is Bayer Aspirin. Thyssen, likewise, still does business in America. The board room criminals who plan and profit from war are little affected it. As Dr. Gustav Gilbert, the American psychologist who interviewed and "analyzed" Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, concluded: evil is the lack of empathy! There is no "empathy" to be found in the board rooms of corporate war profiteers. Empathy has, of late, been demonized ala conservative subverters of the language: those with "empathy" are called "bleeding hearts!"

On another front, impeachment alone will not save the United States from creeping theocracy. The American right wing will still try to force the teaching of religion in public schools, will continue to debunk real science even as they celebrate and advocate junk science like “creationism” and “intelligent design”. The American right wing will still demonize Darwin and attribute to him positions he never took. The American right wing will still strive to make of our country a radical theocracy in which the likes of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell will become American “Mullahs”.

Mere impeachment will not restore the Bill of Rights —the very foundation of our freedom. How many times were the families of American servicemen told that their young men had made the ultimate sacrifice at Normandy and the battle fields of Europe for the ideals of American freedom. If that were so, why is the Bill of Rights now demonized by the GOP, Bush, and the right wing in general? Why are the Bill of Rights under seige by an unconstitutional domestic spying scheme for which Bush has no legal authority under the Fourth Amendment? And most recently, MSNBC warns of an emerging national secret police:

An informal panel of senior Pentagon officials has been holding a series of unannounced private meetings during the past several weeks about how to proceed with a possible merger between the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), a post-9/11 Pentagon creation that has been accused of domestic spying, and the Defense Security Service (DSS), a well-established older agency responsible for inspecting the security arrangements of defense contractors. DSS also maintains millions of confidential files containing the results of background investigations on defense contractors’ employees.

Evil is insidious but also —as we were told so profoundly by Hannah Arendt —banal. [See: Eichmann in Jerusalem] Don't expect Dick Cheney and George Bush et al to reveal themselves by snorting fire, projectile puking green bile, or cackling maniacally when they nuke Iran. Would it were so easy! The reality of evil is more mundane. If fundies can explain the universe with "God did it", they will justify wars of aggression with "God has ordained it!” And even then, Bush's gang of NeoCons lied this nation into war. As Voltaire put it: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

Considering the fact that corporate crooks now rule our nation, global warming seems irreversible and a nuclear strike against Iran may be imminent, one is reminded of this bit of gallows humor:

The doctor told his patient:

"My God, man, you're going to die in five minutes!”

"Gee, Doc!!!! Is there anything you can do?"

"I could boil you an egg!?!"'Toons by Dante Lee; use only with permission

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Bush lied about having found WMD in Iraq for almost a year after the story had been discredited by the Pentagon itself. But this was the same year that Valerie Plame would be "outed" by George W. Bush. Is there a connection? First the Washington Post story:

On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."

The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true. ...

The unmasking of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson by White House officials in 2003 caused significant damage to U.S. national security and its ability to counter nuclear proliferation abroad, Raw Story has learned.

According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran.

Speaking under strict confidentiality, intelligence officials revealed heretofore unreported elements of Plame's work. Their accounts suggest that Plame's outing was more serious than has previously been reported and carries grave implications for U.S. national security and its ability to monitor Iran's burgeoning nuclear program ...

That Plame was "outed" raises serious questions but not merely about the competence of a regime already known to be incompetent. It's worse than that! There is no rational explanation for persisting in a WMD story known to be untrue even as Bush "leaks" information that disrupts Plame's operation. Revenge against Wilson is most certainly a factor, but Bush's motives for deliberately undermining the security of the U.S. must surely go beyond mere revenge. What are the motives for high treason? But, of course, that MSM will never ask that question until they face the emerging truth: Bush betrayed the United States.'Toons by Dante Lee; use only with permission

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

George W. Bush endangered our national security in the process of covering up a fraud that he and Cheney perpetrated upon America and the world —namely, the deliberate lies told to justify his administration's aggression against Iraq.

This is true whether or not Bush “legally” released the classified information most recently in question in the Plame affair. Bush is obliged to a higher law –that of defending the nation. By exposing Plame and her numerous sources and “operations”, he broke that oath. The technicalities of the leak itself are almost irrelevant. He could be innocent of the leak but guilty is his actions subvert the defense of the nation. He is, then, clearly impeachable.

Bush has shown a careless disregard for the security of the people of this nation, thumbing his nose at the Constitution which he consider just a "...Goddamned piece of paper". Put simply, Bush proved himself willing to compromise our security in order to perpetrate yet another cover story, another fraud.

But, in fact, Bush had not de-classified the information before Plame’s name was already in the media. Bush himself has admitted that he selectively leaked classified information that had not been declassified until several days after Scooter Libby leaked it to Judith Miller. Let’s make this simple: Bush claims that he had the God-like power to make legal crimes that he has already committed.

It’s bad enough that Bushco tried repeatedly to justify the American aggression against Iraq with numerous ex post facto rationales, now Bush rewrites the law as he goes along. His entire administration –Cheney, Condo, Card, McClellan, Rumsfeld –have long sounded like an old Amos N’ Andy routine. “Sapphire, would youse belee me, if’n I’s tol’ you….?”

Now let’s talk about how Bush subverted American national security by blowing Plame’s cover, an act typically justified after the harm had already been done. ``I wanted people to see the truth and thought it made sense for people to see the truth.'' [ See: Guardian Unlimited ] That’s baloney on its face.

There are at two big holes in Bush's nonsense. Even if that had been Bush’s “motivation”, it would mean that Bush believed his side of the story ( a lie) was worth compromising national security!

Secondly, even if had not had that effect, it most certainly did not result in a favorable “spin” for Bush. Rather –the opposite. By deliberately blowing Plame's cover, Bush actually proved the lie to his own case for war against Iraq. His motivation was and remains: punishing Joe Wilson for daring to tell the truth about yet another Bush fraud: the reasons for war against Iraq. How many would have known about Joe Wilson if Bush had not decided that punishing Wilson was worth committing high treason? Only the peace movement which, had been, by that time, all but silenced by an apparent conspiracy among “Mainstream Media” kiss ups. Once again a Bush lie told after the fact doesn’t hold water.

As I've previously pointed out, this story is about the quaqmire in Iraq. The Bush case for war was not merely wrong or mistaken. It was a deliberate fraud. Bush has shown himself willing to put American lives in jeopardy in order to keep intact his fraud. One of those lives jeopardized was that of Valerie Plame. Another key point: if the war against Iraq was begun upon a pack of deliberate lies, it was and remains a war crime violating both the Nuremberg Principles and U.S. Codes; Section 2441.

What are the implications of the events that have transpired over the last week or so? Simply this: Bush has lied to the American people yet again! Bush has placed himself above the law and lied about his motivations. Bush has thought his already discredited pack of lies was worth subverting national security in order to get his fraudulent story into the gullible MSM. There are two words for this: high treason!'Toons by Dante Lee; use only with permission